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In my Tao journal, I’ve been explaining the best training strategies to qi energy power for health, healing, stress relief and achieving high performance goals of any kind. My colleague Dan Kleiman of Qigong Radio had a few questions about the crossover into and the connection between nei gong energy arts and meditation. For those of you who don’t subscribe to my journal, I’ll provide a little context, and then you can listen to or download the interview by following the link offered below.

Tao Meditation + Nei Gong Energy Arts: Twigs of the Same Branch?

Simply put, nei gong takes care of the body, its qi energy and the lower base emotions, while meditation takes care of the mind. Nei gong practices are a means for making contact with your body on ever-deeper levels and, through this process, you develop a certain degree of presence. You’ve got to be really disassociated and disconnected to devote hours to qigong practice and not feel your body! But that’s a very different thing from, in sitting practice, systematically working through your body, feeling, making present, becoming aware of, and linking to the lower tantien every physical part of your body, until it becomes completely alive to your awareness.

Both nei gong energy arts and meditation generate presence and awareness, it’s just that movement practices are an offshoot with the aim of opening up, getting the blood and qi energy to circulate and releasing the bulk of the tension necessary to bring the tissues back into a healthy state. In meditation, when you’re developing presence and awareness, including for example correcting your posture and breathing pattern, you will develop a certain amount of health because you become aware of imbalances in your alignments, and thereby have the ability fix them. When you do, the result is better qi flow in the body.

So nei gong energy arts and meditation are like multi-tools, each with their specialty, but they’re always influencing one another because the human body, the qi of the body and the mind are not disconnected–both exist within one continuum at the end of the day. If you operate one part of your body, it’s really difficult not to get the rest of the body involved to one degree or another–not completely, not fully integrated, but on some level.

In the interview, I offer specific advice on how to train along the nei gong energy arts-meditation continuum, including coverage of the specific qi gong sets in our system.